The combined distribution/assignment problem in transportation network planning: a parallel approach on hypercube architecture

The joint distribution/assignment problem plays a central role in urban transport network planning. In this problem, according to the mathematical model proposed by S. P. Evans, the trips are iteratively calculated and assigned to the network in such a way that the resulting traffic flows pattern satisfies the selfish equilibrium condition. Unfortunately the number of variables and constraints increase hardly with the greatness of the networks causing long computational time for the equilibrium solution. In this paper an nCUBE 2 parallel computing architecture is employed to solve the combined problem and to asses the potential of MIMD machines to handle large scale transportation network problems.